AdWords: We All Need Structure

As I mentioned in my previous article, the structure of an AdWords campaign can play a huge part in determining how well you are able to optimise the account. Essentially it should do two key things:

1) Allow you to easily manage and analyse the account on a day to day basis. Its easy for an account to spiral into a sprawling mess over time if it is not created with a logical layout which takes into account future expansions (breaking out new adgroups/campaigns etc). A clue that you've gone wrong is having it feel like a text based RPG every time you want to find specific keywords.

2) Act as an efficient conduit for distributing funds. Getting the money to the high performing keyword areas, whilst starving generic keywords which are hungry for exposure should be a key focus of your account optimisations

The 'Intent' Based Structure

Scanning keywords for intent could be viewed as the search marketing equivalent of demographics. By looking for any signs of user type within the search query, you can start to create groups of users which can, importantly, be analysed for behaviour patterns and metrics, leading to actionable insight.

A quick example would be creating group with Value intent: anyone searching on keywords containing the likes of 'discount', 'sale', 'cheap', 'cheapest'. You can then take this, review against the position of the business, the onsite metrics from your web analytics package and get some actionable insight (such as, lets cut all budget to this area and focus it elsewhere because we only sell the most valuable and luxury items ever to grace this earth, hence ROI is negligible)

Adapting Structure Based On Performance

As a campaign progresses you are going to build up valuable data about not only your intent based groups, but also particular keyword (be it positive or negative). In cases where keywords (or a small group of words) have performance values with an obvious impact on the it is worth creating specific campaigns to help benefit the overall ROI of the account. A couple of examples would be:

Greedy Generics: If removing these keywords is not an ideal option (good for brand visibility etc) make sure budget going to them is ring-fenced and you have the control of how much budget they use on a daily basis, not the number of search queries performed.

Perfect Fits: Often you will find a group of words which are perfect for your campaign i.e. they consistently drive converting traffic at affordable prices. Break these out into a campaign and give it a budget with plenty of headroom – whatever happens in the account, you want to make sure that these make up as big a proportion of your overall traffic as possible.

All things considered, if you can give yourself adequate time at the start of a campaign to thoroughly consider your structure, and to do the necessary analysis of user groups based on intents for the given website, then you can expect to reap the benefits as the campaign progresses (and grows tidily, hopefully).